Lehman’s book now available

    Anne Dillen Pearce Lehman’s book “Mother’s Painful Secret: From the Howling Wilderness to the Halls of Congress – a Saga of Five Generations of an American Family”, takes place in and around Houlton circa 1818, with the banishment of her great-great-grandparents, Catherine Lindsay Dillen and James, from County Down, Ireland.
    The stories of the first four generations were given to her through letters from 1842 – 1881, saved by Eliza, the first Dillen child born in Houlton in 1826, buried in Hodgdon in 1880. “Uncle Ira” G. Hersey of Houlton served in the national congress from 1917 – 1929. His wife Annie Dillen worked for the Aroostook Times from about 1880 – 1884. The two other employees mentioned besides “the editor” are Ben and Walter.
    The letters, never before transcribed, contain more than 100 surnames, most from Aroostook County. They tell of young men going to the California Gold Rush, of lumbering in Colorado, of the continual ‘hard times’ partly caused by the opening of the Eric Canal.
    The book also has accounts of the founding of Houlton, two complete stories of girls in Massachusetts’ textile mills, of the author’s great-grandfather in the worst nine minutes of the Civil War, Maine’s Major General Mark Hersey in WWI, of the Aroostook War; ladies living in the attic with the daughter of a slave, the author and her siblings growing up at Nickerson Lake in the summers and in Washington, D.C. during the exciting years of WWII.
    Signed books are available at APL49@pa.net, at York’s Books and on Amazon.com.